Pat Helland Returns to the SQL Server Team from Developer Division

Pat Helland, the champion of autonomous applications, announced his return to the SQL Server Group in his “Transferring to the SQL Team” post of July 23, 2008. He’s back after a hiatus at Amazon.com and a stint with Scott Guthrie and friends at the developer division.

If you missed Pat’s famous “Autonomous Computing: Fiefdoms and Emissaries” presentation at Tech*Ed 2002, you can peruse the PowerPoints here.

Pat says:

Now, it turns out there is a really special opportunity for me to join a team in SQL called SIA (Strategy, Infrastructure, and Architecture). This spot allows me to work on the business, technology, architecture, infrastructure, and more for one of the industry's leading products. It also allows me to participate in driving some of the new changes in scalable cloud computing (which is, of course, where I am extremely passionate). [Emphasis added.]

The fix in my case was to schedule the next piece of work to be done rather than executing it immediately in the callback. Whenever you're doing these sorts of things, SynchronizationContext is your friend, which in Silverlight is implemented in DispatcherSynchronizationContext. The Post method allows you to queue up a piece of work (execute asynchronously).

Damien’s Experimental LINQ to SQL template post of June 25, 2008 was an encouraging demo of how a T4 template might be used to customize generated LINQ to SQL class code. However, this early version was missing many features required to use the template for production projects.

Generates all the attributes for columns and tables including UpdateCheck, IsDbGenerated, etc.

Supports associations including those with a foreign key

Generates appropriate attributes and code for both serialization modes

The current version is C# only.

Added: 7/23/2008

Lawrence Jones Shows How the EDM Designer’s Update Model from Database Feature Works

Lawrence’s three-part series about the EDM Designer’s Update Model from Database operation explains “the reason behind some of [its] oddities” and answers some frequently asked questions about the feature:

"Often, our strategy for bringing people up to speed on [NHibernate] has been to rely on word-of-mouth and osmosis (often via pair-programming) to get the points across, but now we have a planned staffing ramp-up of a magnitude that will likely make that approach unwieldy."

The screencasts give you deep insight into the complexities of NHibernate and how it differs from LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework.

Matt Hinze Delivers a Step-by-Step Tutorial for Checking Out and Testing LINQ to NHibernate

Note: You must register for a SourceForge account before checking out projects.

Daniel Leiszen Addresses LINQ4SP’s Query Evaluation to CAML Queries

In LINQ4SP Query Evaluation of July 22, 2008, Daniel explains that some LINQ expressions can’t be converted to SharePoint CAML expressions. In this case, the query must be broken into a CAML query that can be executed on the SharePoint server and LINQ expressions executed on the client.

Daniel Crenna Proposes a Pattern for Layering LINQ to SQL and WCF for Silverlight

In the first of a multipart series, LINQ + WCF + Silverlight (Part One) of July 21, 2008, Daniel adds two lightweight classes, AdventureWorksRepository and AdventureWorksUnitOfWork, to those generated by the O/R Designer “to create a functional data layer.”

Gianpaolo Carrera Posts a One-Hour Webcast About SaaS for Enterprise and ISV Architects

Gianpaolo’s Software + Services for Architects Webcast post of July 21, 2008 provides a link to his one-hour SaaS for Architects Webcast with emphasis on Microsoft’s cloud-based services and includes two of its slides.

The first slide (Big Pharma topic) applies to enterprises “wanting to optimize [their] IT environment[s] by leveraging a heathy mix between on-premises, SaaS and cloud” operations.

Shawn also notes Ayende Rahien’s reservations about “availability and scalability on the operations side, and schema versioning and adaptability on the development side” and cautions prospective users about Astoria’s lack of data security features.

in Entity Framework v2. These features would supplement the EntitySet returned by FunctionImports mappings for scenarios where the entity or complex type returned by a stored procedure doesn’t require data tracking and updating.

The dual Web role application has been running in Microsoft's South Central US (San Antonio) data center since September 2009. I believe it is the oldest continuously running Windows Azure application.

About Me

I'm a Windows Azure Insider, a retired Windows Azure MVP, the principal developer for OakLeaf Systems and the author of 30+ books on Microsoft software. The books have more than 1.25 million English copies in print and have been translated into 20+ languages.

Full disclosure: I make part of my livelihood by writing about Microsoft products in books and for magazines. I regularly receive free evaluation software from Microsoft and press credentials for Microsoft Tech•Ed and PDC. I'm also a member of the Microsoft Partner Network.